SPN 9x6: Heaven Can't Wait
My first thought after the episode was finished was that the spell doesn’t actually have to be reversed to fix the deal with the angels. It was the right place to start, being the best lead they had, but they don’t need to do a reverse expulsion, right? They just need to pry open a back door or two, get word out on the angel grapevine, and then let the angels decide for themselves. Most of them will want to go home (and shouldn’t they get to choose regardless?), which resolves most of the problem. And explains “Zeke’s” long game to boot, if he’s looking to be the first one through the door back and expects the Winchesters to be the ones who crack it.
This was the first episode that Zeke (as far as we know, at least) didn’t make an appearance. But the Zeke issue, I think, was very present in Dean’s interactions with Cas. The undermining (“you said I sucked”) followed by grudging lukewarm approval and rewriting of history when absolutely necessary (“I said you were a work in progress”) is a small-scale replaying of the “how dare you believe the things I say to you all the time” lecture in Sacrifice. At the end of the episode, he tells Cas the big lie about the angels having fallen, then gives him a patronizing talking-to that implies that he couldn’t possibly do something about the massive situation that’s crashed down on his head. He lies, lies, keeps everyone as in the dark as possible and as disconnected from each other as possible, because jerking them around gives him the illusion of safety. (I hope he at least helped Cas find a place to live, though.)
Here’s what’s still wigging me about the angels of death: that Cas seems to be under the impression that they healed angels who could be healed and only killed those who were beyond repair. After the first victim, I could kind of understand Ephram not getting it - we know he called the hotline, we saw him drop the gun, but the angel didn’t. But this angel saw Cas fighting for his life - in other words, the pain of his despair was not a pain of something that would end his life - and still went ahead with the hit. Either the angels don’t know how to tell terminal patients from those who can be saved, or they don’t care. Who would ever know? Maybe they’ve just been going around killing perfectly healthy angels for millennia and nobody has caught it. Maybe Naomi hacked into one of their heads and gave them a hit list.
(Maybe this is the problem with angels, that they don’t understand cause and effect, or correlation and causation. The angel seems to think the pain is the problem, but pain is just a symptom of whatever’s killing them.) (Then again, that seems to be the problem with humans, too.)
These last couple of seasons are totally speaking to the plight of the Millennial generation, dude. Kevin and his and his hyperacheivement coming right up against a global corporate-induced catastrophe, with his God-given genius just enough to keep a roof over his head (and even then he feels desperately insecure about it); Sam getting Stan’s judgment over having gone from Stanford boy to handyman; Dean hectoring Cas on Cas being “better than” his sales job after having thrown Cas out on the street from their mission and home.
I…cannot quite get my arms around it yet, but I am finding the interactions between Sam and Crowley to be intriguing.
ANYWAY CAS BABYSITTING AWWW I LOVE HIM SO MUCH GUYS. I was kind of startled when he opened his mouth to sing to the baby and old!Cas range popped out. (A baby a baby there was a baby SHE WAS SO CUTE AWWWWWWW) (I am SO EASY.)
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/315945.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
This was the first episode that Zeke (as far as we know, at least) didn’t make an appearance. But the Zeke issue, I think, was very present in Dean’s interactions with Cas. The undermining (“you said I sucked”) followed by grudging lukewarm approval and rewriting of history when absolutely necessary (“I said you were a work in progress”) is a small-scale replaying of the “how dare you believe the things I say to you all the time” lecture in Sacrifice. At the end of the episode, he tells Cas the big lie about the angels having fallen, then gives him a patronizing talking-to that implies that he couldn’t possibly do something about the massive situation that’s crashed down on his head. He lies, lies, keeps everyone as in the dark as possible and as disconnected from each other as possible, because jerking them around gives him the illusion of safety. (I hope he at least helped Cas find a place to live, though.)
Here’s what’s still wigging me about the angels of death: that Cas seems to be under the impression that they healed angels who could be healed and only killed those who were beyond repair. After the first victim, I could kind of understand Ephram not getting it - we know he called the hotline, we saw him drop the gun, but the angel didn’t. But this angel saw Cas fighting for his life - in other words, the pain of his despair was not a pain of something that would end his life - and still went ahead with the hit. Either the angels don’t know how to tell terminal patients from those who can be saved, or they don’t care. Who would ever know? Maybe they’ve just been going around killing perfectly healthy angels for millennia and nobody has caught it. Maybe Naomi hacked into one of their heads and gave them a hit list.
(Maybe this is the problem with angels, that they don’t understand cause and effect, or correlation and causation. The angel seems to think the pain is the problem, but pain is just a symptom of whatever’s killing them.) (Then again, that seems to be the problem with humans, too.)
These last couple of seasons are totally speaking to the plight of the Millennial generation, dude. Kevin and his and his hyperacheivement coming right up against a global corporate-induced catastrophe, with his God-given genius just enough to keep a roof over his head (and even then he feels desperately insecure about it); Sam getting Stan’s judgment over having gone from Stanford boy to handyman; Dean hectoring Cas on Cas being “better than” his sales job after having thrown Cas out on the street from their mission and home.
I…cannot quite get my arms around it yet, but I am finding the interactions between Sam and Crowley to be intriguing.
- Sam put a lot of himself into Crowley, just before he had a lot of Zeke shoved into him. Crowley might have as much of Sam's humanity as Sam himself does, at this point, and he's actively seeking hits of human feeling but avoiding Sam. There's this weird trauma-bond going on in that basement.
- It’s kind of a similar duality to what I’ve talked about with Sam and Cas in recent seasons: Sam is ostensibly free but doesn’t actually know his own mind, while Crowley is chained up with nothing but his most authentic self to keep him company.
- Unlike with Cas, though, Sam gravitates toward Crowley. We haven’t seen anyone else go down to see Crowley alone since Kevin’s one trip down there. Maybe Crowley’s the one person he doesn’t have weird cognitive dissonance about his uneasiness with, since he seems to know on some level that something’s up with Dean but cannot be reasonably expected to know what.
- Or, whatever else has happened since or whatever Sam remembers, Crowley bore witness to everything that went down in the church.
- lol@ Sam’s continued failure to manipulate Crowley, though. And the fact that even Crowley is too good for his blood. And that he was dumb enough to leave the syringe down there. Dean screws with everyone as easy as breathing and Sam is a total flop at it! It's always been a little surprising to me that Sam isn't very good at getting movement out of people, because he's a total master of defensive deflection. That feels right to me, though I can't quite say why.
- Too bad Crowley didn’t accept Sam’s blood, Crowley might have noticed something was up and given the Zeke game away.
ANYWAY CAS BABYSITTING AWWW I LOVE HIM SO MUCH GUYS. I was kind of startled when he opened his mouth to sing to the baby and old!Cas range popped out. (A baby a baby there was a baby SHE WAS SO CUTE AWWWWWWW) (I am SO EASY.)
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/315945.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.